“Absolutely. So what did you find when you looked closely?”
“What’d I find?”
“Right. Did he make any threats during his outplacement?”
“Wouldn’t surprise me. People do, you know. People lose it, time like that.”
“Not according to his boss at the model shop, the fellow who conducted the outplacement interview along with someone from HR. He said Stadler quit, but he wasn’t violent.”
Rinaldi guffawed. “You trying to trap me or something, Detective? Forget it. I’m telling you this guy was in and out of the loony bin.”
“He was diagnosed with schizophrenia, is that right?”
“What do you want from me? You want to know if this guy Stadler was the sick fuck who went to my boss’s home and killed his dog, I have no idea.”
“Did you talk to him?”
Rinaldi waved his hand. “Nah.”
“Did you ask the police to investigate him?”
“For what? Get the poor guy in trouble, for what?”
“You just said it wouldn’t surprise you if he made threats during his outplacement interview.”
Rinaldi spun his fancy chair around and looked at his computer screen, squinted his eyes. “Who’s the head of Major Cases now? Is it Noyce?”
“Sergeant Noyce, that’s right.”
“Say hi for me. Nice guy. Good cop.”
“I will.” Was he threatening to pull strings? Wouldn’t work if he did, she thought. Sergeant Noyce barely knew him. She’d asked her boss about Rinaldi. “But as to my question, Mr. Rinaldi—you never talked to Stadler, never pointed him out as a potential suspect in the incident at Mr. Conover’s home?”
Rinaldi shook his head again, gave a thoughtful frown. “I had no reason to think he was the one,” he said reasonably.
“So that situation is unresolved, what happened at Mr. Conover’s home?”
“You tell me. Fenwick PD doesn’t seem optimistic about solving it.”
“Did you ever meet Andrew Stadler or talk with him?”
“Nope.”
“Or Mr. Conover? Did he ever meet with Stadler or talk with him?”
“I doubt it. The CEO of a company this size doesn’t usually meet most of his employees, except maybe in group settings.”
“Then it was very kind of him to attend Mr. Stadler’s funeral.”
“Did he? Well, that sounds like Nick.”
“How so?”
“He’s very considerate about his employees. Probably goes to all funerals of Stratton workers. Town like this, he’s a public figure, you know. Part of his job.”
“I see.” She thought for a moment. “But you must have run names by Mr. Conover, names of laid-off employees, to see if any of them rang a bell.”
“I usually don’t bother him at that level, Detective. Not unless I have a firm lead. I let him do his job, and I do mine. No, I wish I could help you. The guy worked for Stratton for, what, like thirty-five years. I just hate to see a loyal employee come to an end like that.”
31
“Yo,” Scott said, appearing from behind Marge’s side of the divider panel next to Nick’s desk. “Looking for some exciting reading? The board books are ready.”
Nick looked up from his screen, a testy e-mail exchange with his general counsel, Stephanie Alstrom, about some tedious and endless battle with the Environmental Protection Agency over the emissions of certain volatile organic compounds in an adhesive used in the manufacture of one of the Stratton chairs that they’d discontinued anyway.
“Fiction or nonfiction?” he said.
“Nonfiction, unfortunately. Sorry it’s so last minute, but I had to redo all the numbers the way you wanted.”
“Sorry to be so unreasonable,” Nick said sardonically. “But I’m the guy on the hot seat.”
“Muldaur and Eilers are arriving at the Grand Fenwick this afternoon,” Scott said, “and I told them I’d get the board books over there before dinner tonight so they could look ’em over. You know those guys—there’s going to be questions, the second they see you. Just so long as you’re ready to face them.”
The board of directors always had dinner in town the night before the quarterly board meeting. Dorothy Devries, the founder’s daughter and the only member of the Devries family on the board, usually hosted them at the Fenwick Country Club, which she more or less owned. It was always a stiff and awkward occasion, with no overt business transacted.
“Ah, Scott, I’m going to have to miss it tonight.” He stood up, feeling rubbed raw, his headache full blown now.
“You’re—you’re kidding me.”
“It’s the fourth-grade school play tonight—they’re doing The Wizard of Oz, and Julia’s got a big part. I really can’t miss it.”
“Please tell me you’re joking, Nick. The fourth-grade play?”
“I missed her school play last year, and I’ve missed the art exhibit and just about every school assembly. I can’t miss this too.”
“You can’t get someone to videotape it?”
“Videotape it? What kind of dad are you?”
“Absentee and proud of it. My kids respect me more for being distant and unavailable.”
“Now. Wait ’til they get into therapy. Anyway, you know as well as I do that nothing ever gets done at those dinners.”
“It’s called schmoozing. A Yiddish word that means saving your job.”
“They’re going to fire me because I didn’t have dinner with them? If they do, Scott, they’re just looking for an excuse anyway.”
Scott shook his head. “Okay,” he said, looking down at the floor. “You’re the boss. But if you ask me—”
“Thanks, Scott. But I didn’t ask you.”
32
Audrey sat at her desk, staring at her little gallery of photographs, and then phoned the Michigan State Police crime lab in Grand Rapids.
Yesterday she’d driven almost two hours to Grand Rapids and handed the bullets, in their little brown paper evidence envelopes, to a crime lab tech who looked barely old enough to be shaving. Trooper Halverson had been polite but all business. He asked her if there were any shell casings, as if she’d maybe forgotten. She told him they hadn’t recovered any, found herself actually apologizing to the boy. She asked how long it would take, and he said their caseload was huge, they were badly understaffed, their backlog was running a good three or four months. Luckily, Sergeant Noyce knew one of the Ramp Rangers, as they called the Michigan Highway Patrolmen, and when she reminded him of that—subtly, delicately—Trooper Halverson had said he’d try to get right to it.
On the phone, Trooper Halverson sounded even younger. He didn’t remember her name, but when she read off the lab file number, he pulled it up on the computer.
“Yes, Detective,” he said, tentative. “Um, well, let’s see here. Okay. They’re .380, brass-jacketed, like you said. The rifling looks to be six left. Gosh, you guys didn’t turn up any casings?”
“The body was dumped. So, as I said, unfortunately, no.”
“It’s just that if you had a casing we could really learn a whole lot more,” he said. He spoke as if she were holding the cartridge casings back and maybe just needed a little persuasion to hand them over. “The casings tend to take imprints so much better than the bullets.”
“No such luck,” she said. She waited patiently while he went through the measurements and specs from his microscope exam. “So, um, based on the land and groove widths, the GRC database spits out like twenty different possible models that might’ve been the weapon in question.” The GRC, she recalled, was the General Rifling Characteristics database, put out by the FBI every year or so on a CD.
“Twenty,” she said, disappointed. “That doesn’t narrow it down too much.”
“Mostly Colts and Davis Industries. A lot of street guns look like this. So I’d say you’re looking for a Colt .380, a Davis .380, or a Smith and Wesson.”
“There’s no way to narrow it down any more? What
about the ammunition?”
“Yes, ma’am, these are hollow-point brass-jacketed bullets. There are some indications that they’re Remington Golden Sabers, but don’t hold me to it. That’s problematic.”
“Okay.”
“And also—well, I probably shouldn’t say this.”
“Yes?”
“No, I’m just saying. Personal observation here. The land width is between .0252 and .054. The groove measurement is between .124 and .128. So it’s pretty tight. That tells me the weapon that fired it is a pretty decent one, not just some Saturday night special. So I’m thinking maybe it’s the Smith and Wesson, because they’re a good manufacturer.”
“How many possible Smith and Wesson models are we talking about?”
“Well, Smith and Wesson doesn’t make any .380s anymore. The only one they ever made was the baby Sigma.”
“Baby Sigma? That’s the name of the gun?”
“No, ma’am. I mean, you know, they have a product line called the Sigma, and for a couple of years—like the mid-to late nineties—the bottom end of the Sigma line was a .380 pocket pistol that people sometimes called the ‘baby’ Sigma.”
She wrote down “S&W Sigma .380.”
“Okay, good,” she said, “so we’re looking for a Smith and Wesson Sigma .380.”
“No, ma’am. I didn’t say that. No suspect weapons should be overlooked.”
“Of course, Trooper Halverson.” The troops were super-careful about what they told you, because they knew that everything had to stand up in a court of law, everything had to be carefully documented, and there couldn’t be any guesswork. “When do you think you might know more?”
“Well, after our IBIS technician enters it.”
She didn’t want to ask how long that would take. “Well, anything you can do to put wings on this, Trooper, would be much appreciated.”
33
The brand-new Fenwick Elementary School auditorium was fancier than a lot of college theaters: plush stadium seating, great acoustics, professional sound system and lighting. It was called the Devries Theater, a gift from Dorothy Stratton Devries, in honor of her late husband.
When Nick had gone to Fenwick Elementary, there hadn’t even been an auditorium. School assemblies had been held in the gym, all the kids sitting on the splintery wooden bleachers. Now it seemed like the fourth-grade class was doing its annual play in a Broadway theater.
Looking around, Nick was glad he’d come. All the parents were here, grandparents too. Even parents who rarely came to any of their kids’ school events, like Emily Renfro’s plastic-surgeon dad, Jim. Jacqueline Renfro was a class mom or something, but her husband was usually too busy doing face-lifts or screwing his receptionist to show up. A number of the parents had mini videocams, ready to film the production on compact digital tape that no one would ever bother to watch.
He was late as usual. Everywhere he went, he seemed to arrive late these days. Marta had dropped Julia off an hour ago so she and the rest of the fourth-graders could get into their handmade costumes, which they’d been working on in art class for months. Julia was excited about tonight because she got to play the Wicked Witch of the West—her choice, a role she’d auditioned for and then pleaded for. Not for her Dorothy, which all the other girls wanted. Nick’s little tomboy had no interest in playing a wimpy character wearing a braided wig and a gingham dress. She knew that the witch part was the scene-stealer. He liked that about her.
She didn’t expect him to be here. He’d already told her a couple of times that he had a work dinner he had to go to and couldn’t get out of. She was disappointed, but resigned. So she’d be all the more excited when she saw her daddy here. In truth, of course, Nick considered sitting through the school play one of those unpleasant parental obligations like changing a poopy diaper, or going to “The Lion King On Ice” (or anything on ice, for that matter), or watching the Teletubbies or The Wiggles and not letting on how creepy they were.
The back sections of the theater had been cordoned off, and there didn’t seem to be any available seats in the front. He peered around, saw a few spaces here and there, a sea of averted glances, a few unfriendly faces. Maybe he was being a little paranoid. Guilt burned on his face as visibly as a scarlet letter. He was convinced people knew what he’d done just by looking at him.
But that wasn’t it, of course. They hated him for other reasons, for being Slasher Nick, for being the local hero who’d turned on them. He saw the Renfros, caught their icy glares before they looked away. Finally he saw one friendly face, a buddy of his from high school days whose son was in Julia’s class.
“Hey, Bobby,” he said, sitting down in the seat Bob Casey had freed up by moving his jacket. Casey, a bald, red-faced guy with an enormous beer gut, was a stockbroker who’d tried to hit Nick up for business several times. He was a wisenheimer whose chief claim to fame since high school was his ability to memorize long stretches of dialogue from Monty Python or any of the National Lampoon or Airplane movies.
“There he is,” Casey said heartily. “Big night, huh?”
“Oh, yeah. How’s Gracie?”
“Doin’ good. Doin’ good.”
A long, uncomfortable silence followed. Then Bob Casey said, “Ever see anything like this theater? We never had anything like this.”
“We were lucky to use the gym.”
“Luxury!” Casey said in his Monty Python voice. “Luxury! We had to walk thirty miles to school every morning in a blizzard—uphill, both ways. And we loved it!”
Nick smiled, amused but unable to laugh.
Casey noticed Nick’s subdued response and said, “So, you’ve had a hard year, huh?”
“Not as hard as a lot of people here.”
“Hey, come on, Nick. You lost your wife.”
“Yeah, well.”
“How’s the house?”
“Almost done.”
“It’s been almost done for a year, right?” he gibed. “Kids okay? Julia seems to be doing good.”
“She’s great.”
“I hear Luke’s having a hard time of it.”
Nick wondered how much Bob Casey knew about Luke’s troubles—probably more than Nick did himself. “Well, you know. Sixteen, right?”
“Tough age. Plus, only one parent and all that.”
The production was about what you’d expect for a fourth-grade play—an Emerald City set they’d all painted themselves, the talking apple tree made out of painted corrugated cardboard. The music teacher playing sloppily on the Yamaha digital piano. Julia, as the Witch, froze up, kept forgetting her lines. You could almost hear the parents in the audience thinking them out loud for her—“Poppies!” and “I’ll get you, my pretty!”
When it was over, Jacqueline Renfro seemed to go out of her way to find Nick and say, “Poor Julia.” She shook her head. “It can’t be easy for her.”
Nick furrowed his brow.
“Well, only one parent, and you hardly ever there.”
“I’m there as much as I can,” he replied.
Jacqueline shrugged, having made her point, and moved on. But her husband, Jim, lagged behind. He wore a brown tweed jacket and a blue button-down shirt, looking like he was still a Princeton undergrad. He pointed a finger at Nick and winked. “Can’t imagine how I’d get by without Jackie,” he said in a confiding tone. “I don’t know how you get by. Still, Julia’s a great kid—you’re very lucky.”
“Thanks.”
Jim Renfro was smiling too hard. “Of course, the thing about family is, when they get to be too much, you can’t exactly downsize them.” A cheery, self-satisfied wink. “Am I right?”
Any number of responses occurred to Nick—too many. None of them nonviolent. He had this strange feeling of a lid coming off, the bleed valves blowing.
At that point, Julia came running up, still wearing her pointed black construction-paper hat and her green face makeup. “You came!” she said.
He threw his arms around her. “I couldn’t m
iss this.”
“How was I?” she asked. There wasn’t a drop of concern in her voice, no awareness that she’d messed up. She was bursting with pride. He loved this little girl.
“You were great,” he said.
34
In the car on the way home, Nick’s cell phone went off, a weird synthesized, symphonic fanfare that he’d never bothered to reprogram.
He glanced at the caller ID, saw that it was Eddie Rinaldi. He picked it up from the cradle, not wanting Julia to hear whatever Eddie had to say over the speakers. She was sitting in the backseat of the Suburban, poring over the Wizard of Oz program in the darkness. She still had the green zinc-oxide face makeup on, and Nick could see a bedtime struggle ahead when he made her clean it off.
“Hey, Eddie,” he said.
“There you are. You had the phone off?”
“I was watching Julia’s school play.”
“Okay,” he said. Eddie, who had no kids, no plans to have any, and no interest in them, never asked about his kids beyond the bare minimum required. “I was thinking of dropping by.”
“Can’t it wait?”
A pause. “I think not. We should talk. Only take five minutes, maybe.”
“There a problem?” Nick was suddenly on edge.
“No, no. No problem. Just, we should talk.”
Eddie sprawled in the easy chair in Nick’s study, legs splayed wide as if he owned the place.
“A homicide detective came to talk to me,” he said casually.
Nick felt his insides go cold. He leaned forward in his desk chair. Here they sat, just a few feet from where it had happened. “What the fuck?” he said.
Eddie shrugged, no big deal. “Standard operating procedure. Routine shit.”
“Routine?”
“She’s just covering all the bases. Got to, sloppy if she didn’t.”
“It’s a woman.” Nick focused on the anomaly, avoiding the main issue: a homicide detective was on the case, already?
Company Man Page 15